Oliver Twist

Musical Oliver

It was inevitable a musical version of Dickens's second
most popular story would eventually be created, I suppose.

And 1968's Oliver!, based on a lauded Broadway production, was
considered a great success, winning a slew of Academy Awards and launching
several songs that people are still humming decades later ("Consider
Yourself", "Who Will Buy This Wonderful Morning", "You Gotta Pick a Pocket
or Two", "Where Is Love"). And the film is still a favourite, to judge by
movie site comments.

But it's ain't Dickens. Way too cheerful for one thing. Dickens did
include plenty of comedy and playful touches in even his most serious
dramas. But Oliver! (that exclamation point gives it away before
the movie even begins) is almost unrelenting in its cheeriness—all that
singing and dancing that sometimes seems to go on forever.

At least three
times the plot comes to a dead stop to accommodate production numbers
taking over what seems to be the entire city. Once, just when it seems
impossible it could get any bigger, an entire parade is brought in.

And it's so squeaky clean. The slums of London are picturesquely
slummy. The urchins, starting with Oliver and the Artful Dodger, are cute
as heck and strategically scuffed. Nancy looks like a Beatle girlfriend
circa 1966, with gleaming blond hair and pretty frocks.

Even the thug Bill
Sikes, played with due malevolence by Oliver Reed, is magnetically
thuggish. He provides the darkest moments of the film, hitting the lowest
point with a disturbing murder.

And Fagin. Ron Moody won accolades for reprising his stage role in the
film as the lovable scoundrel.... What, you didn't know from the book that
Fagin was such a sweetheart? Sure, he's mercenary but, underneath
that, heart of gold all the way. Which requires a major rewrite of
Dickens's pathetic end for the old gent. Oliver! closes with him
and the Dodger literally singin' and dancin' off into the sunset to a
bright future life of petty crime.

Mark Lester as Oliver

With the supposedly bad guys getting all the attention, Mark Lester as Oliver
is lost in the soft-shoe shuffle. However, he gamely pulls off the
role of the vulnerable innocent, without whom none of the surrounding
hoopla would make any sense. And he seems to have a sweet singing voice—though
it was revealed decades later that his singing was dubbed by a young woman.

Ah, well, he is cute.

As might be predicted, Oliver's sad back story is given short shrift, Monks
is dropped from the plot altogether, Mr. Brownlow's household is reduced
substantially, and the boy's revealed heritage is simplified.

So, is Oliver! worth seeing?

Not for Dickens, not for Oliver
Twist. But maybe for a British version of a big-budget,
Hollywood-style musical—considered by many critics to be one of the best
film musicals ever made.